We developed 15 novel polymorphic microsatellites for the Pacific oyster Crassostrea gigas by screening genes and expressed sequence tags (ESTs) found in GenBank. The number of alleles per locus ranged from two to 24 with an average of 8.7, and the values of observed heterozygosity (H_o) and expected heterozygosity (H_e) ranged from 0.026 to 0.750 and from 0.120 to 0.947, respectively. No significant pairwise linkage disequilibrium was detected among loci and eight loci conformed to Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. Transferability of the markers was examined on five other Crassostrea species and all the markers were amplified successfully in at least one species. These new microsatellites should be useful for population genetics, parentage analysis and genome mapping studies of C. gigas and closely related species. The nine markers identified from known genes are expected to be especially valuable for comparative mapping as type I markers.